COLUMN LEFT/ CAROL A. SOBEL : A Basic Right Merits Shield From the Mob : The Administration’s action in Wichita case would deny use of civil-rights tools.

In an extraordinary move, the Bush Administration has entered a case in Kansas challenging the ability of federal courts to protect the rights of women. A federal judge applied a 120-year-old civil-rights law to limit the unlawful blockades of three facilities providing abortion services and to halt the physical harassment of patients and staff at those sites. The blockades are coordinated by Operation Rescue, a group that has traveled the country in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy to do by force what it has been unable to do by law: deny all women access to safe and legal abortions.

Operation Rescue does not deny that the blockades are illegal. They simply claim that as “pro-life Christians” they have some special authority that sets them above the law.

This lawless activity creates significant risk, and possible irreparable harm, to the women caught up in the anti-abortion group’s violence. In most instances, the blockades are directed at clinics that provide gynecological and reproductive health services, including cancer screening, pregnancy testing and prenatal care.

In Operation Rescue’s eyes, all women who patronize a physician who provides any abortion-related services are equally guilty of murder. Consequently, when these protesters learn that their relentless physical harassment causes a woman seeking emergency care, and who wants to continue her pregnancy to term, to suffer a miscarriage, as happened in California, they show no remorse. When they break into an operating room just as a woman is about to undergo an abortion, as they have done, they call it justified because they have stopped a “murder.”

Even if these demonstrators only stood in the door and blocked entry, they would be no different than those bigots who stood in the doorway in Little Rock in the 1950s and at the Ole Miss in the 1960s. Their purpose is the same: to prevent people, in this case women, from exercising a fundamental right. Such conduct was unlawful then, and it is unlawful now.

Operation Rescue’s far-flung conspiracy, with its physical and psychological terror aimed at women, bears a striking resemblance to the pervasive race-based conspiracies that were the original impetus for the Civil Rights Act of 1871. But that legislation does not speak of protecting only African-Americans, or protecting only against the acts of the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it talks in broad terms about the need to redress private vigilantes who conspire to deprive people of equal rights.

In 1871, Congress felt compelled to create an individual’s right of action to prosecute civil-rights violations by private parties because, whether they were unable or unwilling to do so, local law enforcement did not ensure adequate protection of federal civil rights. In Wichita in recent weeks, the mayor and governor appeared at anti-abortion rallies. Police allowed blockaders to use every possible delaying tactic following arrest, then released them back to the blockade after payment of a $25 fine. Responding to this, Judge Patrick F. Kelly ordered federal marshals to ensure that the order of the court was enforced and that the clinics stayed open.

No matter how hard Operation Rescue tries to disclaim the association, the mob image is the same. The group’s organized campaign, like the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, seeks by force to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights to travel to obtain medical care, including the right to decide whether and when to terminate a pregnancy.

The Bush Administration and Operation Rescue now argue that the law does not apply to women and that it is limited to race-based discrimination. They contend that even if the statute is construed to apply to women, abortion is simply not a gender-based characteristic. As they argue, and as Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a decision two decades ago, the world is composed of two kinds of people: pregnant people and non-pregnant people. Because women are in both groups, they conclude that the ability to become pregnant cannot be gender-based. In their illogic, the fact that only women will ever become pregnant is irrelevant.

The irony is that at the time the 1871 civil-rights law was passed, women had not even attained the rights and privileges of black males and abortion was not illegal. If the Administration’s reasoning prevails, women will be foreclosed from using vital civil-rights tools simply because they were non-persons at the time the rights of black males were recognized, and the right that they now seek to enforce had not yet been explicitly recognized. Because justice was slow in coming, then, women will forever be condemned to inequality.